Good to Great

1. Good is the enemy of Great
2. Level 5 Leadership
3. First Who…Then What
4. Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)
5. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles)
6. A culture of Discipline
7. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop

Level 5 Leaders

An individual who blends extreme personal humility with intense professional will.

Why should I try to?

The question brought me up short. This was not a lazy person asking; he’d started his own business as a young man, put himself through law school, and after graduate school because a driven entrepreneur. He has remarkable energy, an intense and infectious enthusiasm. Yet he questions the who idea of trying to build something great and lasting.

I can offer two answers:

First, I believe that it is no harder to build something great than to build something good. It might be statistically ore rare to reach greatness, but it does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity. Indeed, if some of the comparison companies in our study are any indication, it involves less suffering, and perhaps even less work. The beauty  and power of the research findings is that they can radically simplify our lives while increasing our effectiveness. 

…Simple, clean, straightforward, elegant- and a heck of a lot of fun….

…To be clear, I am not suggesting that going from good to great is easy, or that every organization will successfully make the shift. By definition, it is not possible for everyone to be above average. But I am asserting that those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbering mediocrity. Yes, turning good into great takes energy.

The second is that at the very heart of what motivated us to undertake this huge project in the first place: the search for meaning, or more precisely, the search for meaningful work.

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I was truly blessed to have an extraordinary group of people dedicated to the project. In aggregate, they contributed something on the order of 15,000 hours of work to the project, and the standard they set for themselves in the quality of their work set a high standard for me to try to live up to.hikg